Gah, ages ago now, the cinetrix heard some sort of rumor that NYT film critic Manohla Dargis was enrolled in a graduate program. UCLA or something, hardly matters. The reason I bring it up is the certain academic/bookish slant I keep noticing in her reviews of late. Not all the time, mind, but enough. To whit:

This is the third time that Mr. Winterbottom has tackled Hardy for the big screen, following “Jude,” a period adaptation of “Jude the Obscure,” and “The Claim,” which loosely transposed “The Mayor of Casterbridge” to 1860s California. Mr. Winterbottom has said he first read “Jude the Obscure” when he was a teenager and reread it several more times. He grew up to become a mercurial filmmaker who changes his visual style as often as he does subjects and whose films, even the nonliterary ones, share a pessimism that may be traceable to reading too much Hardy at a tender age. Even “The Trip,” Mr. Winterbottom’s funny gastronomic excursion through the Lake District of England with the comics Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, is touched by gloominess unrelated to the weather.

It seems possible that Mr. Jacquot also dipped into Ms. Thomas’s “Wicked Queen: The Origins of the Myth of Marie-Antoinette,” a cultural history that explores the mythifying of the queen largely through the pamphlets written about her. Widely disseminated before the revolution and even after heads began rolling, the pamphlets started off as fairly benign, more Us Weekly than Foreign Affairs — Marie Antoinette’s imperial bouffant was mocked along with her manners — but later become more pointed and politically expedient.

So, yeah, that. Nothing profound, just something leaping out at me recently. Of course, Ms. Manohla continues to be a critic whose work actually engages with the plastics of the art under discussion, too. Which is always nice:

For Daney, postwar cinema, which is to say modern cinema, would thus be inexorably linked to childhood—both his own and, more generally, to the childhood experience—which is why he would return time and again to two very different kinds of “kids’ movies”—Fritz Lang’s Moonfleet and Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter—as examples of how films, like fathers, can guide us into the world:

At first, she was like his protégé. He coached her on acting and hooked her up with his agent, who got her a very lucrative contract at Paramount. They spent their evenings at home now, having dinner with each other or with friends, like actor Richard Bathelmess and his wife. But they were also like ships sailing in opposite directions. He was coasting on his great success, while she was working like mad, making picture after picture.

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While some of the dialogue might, in real life, be reversed—she being the protégé—it echoes their own relationship, their marriage, and their continued friendship. And even later, when Irene tells Godfrey, “You love me and you know it. There’s no sense in struggling against a thing when it’s got you. That’s all there is to it,” I get the sense Powell and Lombard knew it too.

The first stop finds Anders with an old party buddy (Hans Olav Brenner) who has uncomfortably drifted into suburban fatherhood. The way this guy guzzles beer at lunchtime suggests he’s not quite as settled down as he’d like to pretend, and askance glares from the missus drag down the cordial conversation, linking the exchange to a past we’re left only to imagine.

That’s the trouble with Anders. Everybody gave up on him years ago, assuming he’d turn up dead sooner or later. His parents have to sell the family house to cover his frightening debts, and his own sister can’t even bear to have a meal with him. She instead fakes some work nonsense and sends her brusque girlfriend to make excuses. Anders has been counted out for so long that his sudden reappearance becomes more of an inconvenience than a welcome reunion. Nobody wants to make much of an effort because he’s probably just going to let them all down again.

So why even bother? That’s the awful, existential question posed by Oslo, August 31st. Anders moves through the picture like a ghost, and Danielsen Lie’s performance grows increasingly closed off and enigmatic. As a smart guy from a good family who just can’t help destroying himself, Anders deliberately tanks the job interview and starts putting himself into dangerous situations, perhaps more out of habit than anything else. Trier keeps the camera in front of Anders with a tight telephoto lens, allowing him to drift in and out of focus.

I'M SO EXCITED! And I will present any audience member who cries "hipster" with my AM I SUPPOSED TO JUST NOT LIKE ANYTHING EVER? monologue, which goes like this: AM I SUPPOSED TO JUST NOT LIKE ANYTHING EVER? AM I ONLY ALLOWED TO LIKE THE REALITY SHOW ABOUT THE STUPID PEOPLE SO I DON'T SEEM PRETENTIOUS? WHY CAN'T I LIKE THAT AND WES ANDERSON? Ugh, stereotypes are so complicated. I like "graphic novels" because I can be a member of the cultural elite without having to know any big words. I've cracked the code, suckers!

But sometimes you stick with a director because, despite his blind spots and fetishes, you believe in him. Something about what he once did lingers in this perfect, permanent way. You’re tattooed. So movie after movie you wait. He’s come so close so often that it’s only a matter of time until he figures out how to do it, how to be the director he promised to become. “Moonrise Kingdom” is Anderson’s seventh movie, and it’s the first since “Rushmore” that works from the opening shot to the final image.

Anderson’s partisans think he’s already figured it out, that he was getting stronger. It’s not true. When, oh when, would he combine his aesthetic obsessions (the francophilia, the Americana, the prep-schoolery), with his natural wit and the heart you assume he had? I love the meticulous diorama framing and the hoisting, pivoting, dumbwaitered, nearly hydraulic camerawork. I would even tolerate the dollhouse framing. I just didn’t want the dolls. I wanted Anderson to show me a soul. “Moonrise Kingdom” does that.

Criticwire's latest poses the question I ask of my students on the first day of class every semester: I want to remove the idea of shame early on. One year, a young woman who was trying to add the class e-mailed me and said she deserved a spot more than another female student who had answered, Titanic. I replied that such a comment was beneath her, and she was duly chastened [although I secretly agreed].

What's your answer? I usually say a tie between The Blues Brothers and The Big Lebowski, which I suspect puts the young men at ease. Now I just wish I recognized more than half of the respondents' names.

So click through if you must, load up your queue, or list in the comments how many of these you've seen. For me, this list is a snapshot of moving away from art house heaven, being broke, experiencing Netflix guilt, or suffering shelving fatigue [wherein one has reshelved these films at the video store so many times--frequently, as fellow employees' picks--the thought of fucking watching them ever becomes too much of a chore].

In moving forward with its film education goal, Facets has decided to expand its courses, classes, and lecture series. For the past month, I have been researching the noncredit courses, lecture series, and informal classes offered by museums, arts organizations, and other institutions to help develop and design additional film programs for Facets. My first question for my readers and colleagues outside the Chicago area is: Do you know of any organizations that host arts or film classes? If so, please send me the links so that I can compare and contrast with what I already have.

Fleeting yet easily remembered, this outfit reflects just how ‘on fire’ Jan is after rumbling Brad’s scheme. She is back in a hat, one of her most distinctive in fact; a cloche variant worn far back on the head. Of course, typical for Day and how this style was generally worn in the fifties. One point to note: Jan wears both leather gloves and a handwarmer here, which even for autumn/winter New York seems a tad excessive.

What Epstein loved about the camera’s capacity to enlarge (“The close-up is the soul of cinema”), for instance, he shared with Louis Aragon, who, like Schrader, used to think that selected objects or parts of the décor in a shot or scene could become “remotivated,” and focused on the way film could isolate and magnify objects through framing especially in close-ups, or with Walter Benjamin, who compared the cameraman to a surgeon, “penetrating deeply into the reality web,” “zooming in to pry an object from its shell.” But more important even than the camera’s analytic properties to the conception of photogénie, was that the image contain or be in motion. Movement is the essence of cinema, Epstein decides contra Barthes, the constantly changing quality of photogénie is of the essence (“Until now, I have never seen an entire minute of purephotogénie”), perhaps captured best by the image of a smile slowly appearing on a face seen in close-up, nay the anticipation of that smile.

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Film Comment used to include in its poll of the best films of the year a kind of alternative (counter) canon composed entirely of contingent moments. “Moments out of time,” this Adair-like collection of fondly remembered bits and pieces was called. Going through these moments now is bringing the films back to mind a process of what both Barthes and Benjamin call “anamnesis,” evoking narrative less than atmosphere, “aura:” “a tumbleweed in L.A.” bringing back The Big Lebowski; “The squeaking of the plastic chairs under the investigators as they interview the suspect,” reanimating Fincher’s Zodiac –what they meant, mean now, could have meant and could still mean. These moments, although they need little explanation for the cinephile in the know, are idiosyncratic, in that they rely upon the critic’s personal recollection of non-canonical moments in a movie (from Renoir’s La Nuit du Carrefour, Godard remembered especially the “purr of a Bugatti”). But sometimes the love of a particular moments is shared, love is somehow “in the air,” which does not always produce a joyful feeling in the cinephile who wants to keep this cherished treasure to himself.

While this is a short list of ten films, one or several of these films is on the list of the favorite films of virtually every woman director or film critic I know. (This list, in fact, may be a separate, secret canon of the films that women love, as opposed to the “gender neutral” canon of greatest films which is actually comprised primarily of films chosen mostly by men.)

These films are the favorites of so many women because they describe the complexities and conflicts of female friendship accurately, the unique joys and also darker aspects that often remain hidden or at least unacknowledged in real-life friendships.

"There's definitely a boy's club in film journalism and film criticism," she said. "I felt like I had to fight to be included in editorial decisions. I did the math on one outlet I wrote for, and less than 10% of their reviews were written by women. Last year Sight and Sound had an essay contest for women writers, and the winner would maybe be published on the blog! It's so condescending! I wanted to show that women were perfectly capable of writing intelligently and in-depth about movies, they just needed the opportunity."

"It takes so much effort for women to get to the starting line, to get onto an editor's radar. I also wonder if sometimes the things that women are interested in -- the way they respond to certain movies -- may not be of interest to many male editors, but would be to many female readers. I've found that's true. In cinephile circles you see mostly men, but women cinephiles are out there. They're often just isolated from those nerd-herd scenes."

For as long as I can remember, I've been pretty much bisexual at the movies. I swing both ways. I drink from both taps. Last year I was, like everyone else, gaga for Gosling after that elevator kiss with Carey Mulligan in Drive. The year before that, The Kids Are Alright brought my 10-year-old Mark Ruffalo crush out of hibernation. A year previous it was James Franco, the generous Adonis of Milk, tenderly smooching with Sean Penn in long-shot from an first-storey window. Bliss.

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The screen is an equal opportunity seducer – polymorphically perverse. If you are a man (or a woman) and you watch the famous scene in Notorious where Cary Grant nibbles Ingrid Bergman's ear while she is answering the phone, you don't feel two different things depending on which half of the screen you look at. I don't look at Bergman and go "yummy" and then look at Grant and go "shame about him." Such is the heat of the movie screen that every grain and pixel is suffused with longing. The fact is: I have spent as much time in the dark of the movie theatre watching men kiss and be kissed, and getting a kick out of it, as I have women.

But before we start designing flags of Susan B. Anthony spanking Matt Bomer in assless chaps, it's worth looking beyond the gyrations and oiled-up bodies to the plot of Magic Mike. And if you do, you'll see that beefcake aside, at the heart of the film is the same story that romances have been telling for years: Women just want a guy whom they can fix.